petrichor

What is the law?

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The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr as quoted in The Concept of Law by HLA Hart

Tardigrade Update

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They are back in space. SpaceX took 5000 of them to the International Space Station in June:

https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-tardigrades-squid-space-station-study-2021-6

They can survive the vacuum of space, and to some degree, the ionizing radiation.

But they are not indestructible (fortunately, perhaps?). If shot out of a gun at a speed greater than 2000 mph (that’s faster than your normal speeding bullet) they turn to mush. Scientists tested this after an Israeli spacecraft bearing tardigrades crashed on the Moon in 2019. The study indicated that the crash would have killed them. Although without water and in their cryptobiotic “tun” state they shouldn’t have been able to proliferate, still, as the Guardian commented, “From the Moon’s point of view, this was a failed alien invasion.”

https://www.businessinsider.com/tardigrades-survive-being-shot-gun-2021-5

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/mar/20/tardigrades-natures-great-survivors

Interestingly, the Guardian article also describes research on the tardigrade’s use of “intrinsically disordered proteins” to protect from desiccation and freezing. The significance of how proteins fold has long been recognized, as their three dimensional shape is intrinsically related to their function. In recent years great progress has been made on the protein-folding problem.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/26/science/protein-design-david-baker.html

(article by Carl Zimmer in the New York Times)

Intrinsically disordered proteins could have practical applications in medicine, the Guardian tells us, such as in the preservation of vaccines.

Free Association

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free association is (obviously, if you think about it) not free. those associations are bound to each other somewhere, that’s the whole point.

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The philosopher Susan Schneider points out that consciousness may be superfluous, or even a hindrance, to a superintelligent AI.

“[T]he architecture of an advanced AI may contrast sharply with ours. Perhaps none of its computations will need to be conscious. A superintelligent AI, in particular, is a system which, by definition, possesses expert-level knowledge in every domain. . . What would be novel to it? What task would require slow, deliberative focus? Wouldn’t it have mastered everything already? Perhaps, like an experienced driver on a familiar road, it can use nonconscious processing. . . Over time, as a system grows more intelligent, consciousness could be outmoded altogether. The simple consideration of efficiency suggests, depressingly, that the most intelligent systems of the future may not be conscious. . . Viewed on a cosmic scale, consciousness may be just a blip, a momentary flowering of experience before the universe reverts to mindlessness.”

Schneider, Susan. Artificial You (pp. 34-37). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

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Sue Halpern in the New York Review of Books (October 21, 2021, “The Human Costs of AI”) quotes from an essay written by the (not-human) natural language processor GPT-3. The essay was written “not long after [GPT-3] was released”. The third version of the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT-3) was asked to compose a piece with the title “The Future of Humanity”. She writes that the result “was, essentially, a collection of words and phrases one might expect to see in such an essay. Strung together, though, they were vacuous.” That is, mindless, without intelligence. Here’s the last sentence of her example:

"We are on the brink of a technological revolution that has the potential to eradicate human suffering while simultaneously bringing an end to our existence as a species."

But what if we take that sentence as a proposal? Clearly, bringing an end to our existence as a species would indeed eradicate human suffering. From the point of view of an AI that might make some sense.

It might even be something that we would want it to do for (to) us.

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9/9/97
9 am

Each word as it comes forth is a digression, a history of its own.  It could never be something of mine.  It is owned by history, by a commonality.  These words connect us before I even set them down.  Before I have said anything, I question the saying.  If I must interrogate each stone, my building will not be grand, no castle or monument.  Perhaps it will simply be a row of stones, or a jumble, a collection, a cairn, a garden of stones. 

If I wrote of the tantalizing atmosphere, the continual sensation of about-to-rain that has persisted since yesterday, the damp cloudiness, the pinked gray of dusk then dawn that refuses to lose moisture to the thirsty ground, then I would raise a jumble of questions.  A patterned field of stone lies between us, historied and mysterious.  Issues of place, fact, person, metaphor.  We are each the center of our respective universes, but we like to make ourselves the clouds and the ground as well, to pretend that the atmosphere can tantalize, and the soil thirst.